Process Recorder - psrec
I’ve been progressively trying to learn the Rust programming language for around a year and a half now and as well as porting some of my existing C/C++ apps I have to Rust as learning exercises (but with the C/C++ versions still mostly being the main ones for the moment) I have also started to write some new from-scratch apps in Rust when I think that makes sense, rather than defaulting to C/C++ as I previously would have.
I’d recently had the need to record some basic app process stats (CPU usage and RSS memory usage) over the duration of its running, and while there are existing applications out there - i.e. psrecord - that would largely do what I wanted, I was tempted to try and write my own version in a “native” language - at least for the recording part: the plotting / visualisation part is a bit more tricky. This was partly so as to have another small project with which to gain more experience with Rust, but also because I wanted additional features like the ability to control whether to have “normalised” or “absolute” CPU usage, and the ability to separate CPU time into user and system time - so I’ve written an initial version of psrec which is my own equivalent to psrecord written in Rust.
This initial version is pretty basic so far, and doesn’t yet support all the additional features I wanted: I’m making use of the psutil crate to extract the process information for the moment, but its functionality is incomplete as it doesn’t support extracting info on a process’ children, or info like the number of active threads a process has, which is functionality I will likely want at some point, so I’m no doubt going to have to get down in the weeds with the /proc/<pid>/ file system interface, which can sometimes seem a bit primitive and messy in my experience (it would be nice to have a first-class API to access the data efficiently, rather than doing string parsing, although it does make things very visual and easy to debug).
For the moment, I’m using Python and matplotlib to plot the resulting data, which to some extent is a bit at odds with writing the main app in a compiled language like Rust, but I think it’s okay for the moment, and it allows the recording app to theoretically be more efficient and low-overhead (although polling the /proc/ file system and recording samples every second isn’t really that much overhead), whilst using Python for things it’s very good at.
Below is a basic example of the chart plot of a quick process recording:
